PREPARATION FOR THE EXHIBITION—BIRTH OF THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT—THE BLOW DEALT BY FATE—FOREIGN TROUBLES—ENGLISH ART.
The first great public meeting in the interest of the Exhibition was held in London in the February of this year, and on the 21st of March a banquet was given at the Mansion House to promote the same cause. Prince Albert was present, with the ministers and foreign ambassadors; and the mayors and provosts of all the principal towns in the United Kingdom were also among the guests. The Prince delivered an admirable speech to explain his view of the Exhibition.
It was at this time that the Duke of Wellington made the gratifying proposal that the Prince should succeed him as Commander-in-chief of the army, urging the suggestion by every argument in his power, and offering to supply the Prince with all the information and guidance which the old soldier's experience could command. After some quiet consideration the Prince declined the proposal, chiefly on the ground that the many claims which the high office would necessarily make on his time and attention, must interfere with his other and still more binding duties to the Queen and the country.
On May-day, 1850, her Majesty's third son and seventh child was born. The Prince, in announcing the event to the Dowager-Duchess of Coburg, says: "The little boy was received by his sisters with jubilates. 'Now we are just as many as the days of the week,' was the cry, and then a bit of a struggle arose as to who was to be Sunday. Out of well-bred courtesy the honour was conceded to the new-comer."
The circumstance that the 1st of May was the birthday of the Duke of Wellington determined the child's name, and perhaps, in a measure, his future profession. The Queen and the Prince were both so pleased to show this crowning mark of friendship from a sovereign to a subject, that they did not allow the day to pass without intimating their intention to the Duke. "It is a singular thing," the Queen wrote to Baron Stockmar, "that this so much wished-for boy should be born on the old Duke's eighty-first birthday. May that, and his beloved father's name, bring the poor little infant happiness and good fortune!"
An amusing episode of the Queen's visit to Ireland had been the passionate appeal of an old Irishwoman, "Och, Queen, dear! make one of them Prince Patrick, and all Ireland will die for you!" Whether or not her Majesty remembered the fervent request, Prince Arthur had Patrick for one of his names, certainly in memory of Ireland, and William for another, partly in honour of one of his godfathers—the present Emperor of Germany—and partly because it would have pleased Queen Adelaide, whose sister, Duchess Ida of Saxe-Weimar, was godmother. Prince Albert's name wound up the others. The child was baptized on the 22nd of June at Buckingham Palace. The two godfathers were present; so were the Duchesses of Kent and Cambridge (the Duke of Cambridge lay ill), Prince George and Princess Mary of Cambridge, the Prince of Leiningen, and Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, the ministers and foreign ambassadors. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London and Oxford, &c. &c., officiated. Prince Albert's chorale, "In life's gay morn," was performed again. After the christening there was a State banquet in the picture gallery. Prince Arthur was the finest of all the Queen's babies, and the royal nurseries still retain memories of his childish graces.
Before the ceremony of the christening, and within a month of the birth of her child, her Majesty was subjected to one of the most wanton and cowardly of all the attacks which half-crazed brains prompted their owners to make upon her person. She had driven out about six o'clock in the evening, with her children and Lady Jocelyn, to inquire for her uncle, the Duke of Cambridge, who was suffering from his last illness. While she was within the gates of Cambridge House, a tall, gentlemanlike man loitered at the entrance, as it appeared with the by no means uncommon wish to see the Queen. But when her carriage drove out, while it was leisurely turning the corner into the road, the man started forward, and, with a small stick which he held, struck the Queen a sharp blow on the face, crushing the bonnet she wore, and inflicting a severe bruise and slight wound on the forehead. The fellow was instantly seized and the stick wrested from his grasp, while he was conveyed to the nearest police-station.
The Queen drove home, and was able to show herself the same evening at the Opera, where she was received with the singing of the National Anthem and great cheering.
The offender was neither a boy nor of humble rank. He proved to be a man of thirty—a gentleman by birth and education.
The Prince wrote of the miserable occurrence to Baron Stockmar that its perpetrator was a dandy "whom you must often have seen in the Park, where he has made himself conspicuous. He maintains the closest silence as to his motives, but is manifestly deranged. All this does not help to make one cheerful."
The man was the son of a gentleman named Pate, of wealth and position, who had acted as sheriff of Cambridgeshire. The son had had a commission in the army, from which he had been requested to retire, on account of an amount of eccentricity that had led at least to one serious breach of discipline. He could give no reason for his conduct beyond making the statement that he had acted on a sudden uncontrollable impulse. He was tried in the following July. The jury refused to accept the plea of insanity, and he was sentenced, like his predecessor, to seven years' transportation.
At the date of the attack the minds of the Queen and the Prince, and indeed of a large portion of the civilised world, were much occupied with a serious foreign embroilment into which the Government had been drawn by what many people considered the restless and interfering policy of Lord Palmerston, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He had gone so far as to send a fleet into Greek waters for the protection of two British subjects claiming assistance, and in the act he had offended France and Russia.
Much political excitement was aroused, and there were keen and protracted debates in both Houses of Parliament. In the House of Lords something like a vote of censure of the foreign policy of the Government was moved and carried. In the House of Commons the debate lasted five nights, and the fine speech in which Lord Palmerston, a man in his sixty-sixth year, defended his policy, was continued "from the dusk of one day to the dawn of the next."
Apart from these troubles abroad, the country, on the whole, was in a prosperous and satisfactory condition. Trade was flourishing. Neither had literature fallen behind. Perhaps it had rarely shown a more brilliant galaxy of contemporary names, including those of John Stuart Mill in logic, Herbert Spencer in philosophy, Charles Darwin in natural science, Ruskin in art criticism, Helps as an essayist. And in this year Tennyson brought out his "In Memoriam," and Kingsley his "Alton Lock". It seemed but natural that the earlier lights should be dying out before the later; that Lord Jeffrey, the old king of critics, should pass beyond the sound of reviews; and Wordsworth, after this spring, be seen no more among the Cumberland hills and dales; and Jane Porter, whose innocent high-flown romances had been the delight of the young reading world more than fifty years before, should end her days, a cheerful old lady, in the prosaic town of Bristol.
In the Academy's annual exhibition the same old names of Landseer (with his popular picture of the Duke of Wellington showing his daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, the field of Waterloo), Maclise, Mulready, Stanfield, &c. &c., came still to the front. But a new movement, having a foreign origin, though in this case an English development, known as the pre-Raphaelite theory, with Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti as its leaders, was already at work. This year there was a picture by Millais—still a lad of twenty-one—in support of the protest against conventionality in the beautiful, which did not fail to attract attention, though it excited as much condemnation as praise. The picture was "Christ in the House of His Parents," better known as "The Carpenter's Shop."